


blinded me with sweater vests

by veterization



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, M/M, Marcel AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-23
Updated: 2013-07-23
Packaged: 2017-12-21 02:29:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/894744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veterization/pseuds/veterization
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marcel really is the geekiest person Louis has ever seen with that gelled hair and that horrendous sweater vest, so it sucks that Louis really, really wants to get to know him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	blinded me with sweater vests

**Author's Note:**

> am I just not supposed to fall in love with the idea of a nerdy Harry Styles still being the apple of Louis' eye??? am I not??? aka everybody go watch the best song ever video
> 
> the title is satirized off the wonderful song "Blinded Me With Science" by Thomas Dolby
> 
> this was just supposed to be a short blurb of maybe 3k that turned into a much larger thing!! I hope you guys enjoy because it was super fun to write (◡‿◡✿)
> 
> Also, just a heads up that Marcel and Harry are not different people in this story!

"Do you think his mum dresses him?"

"I really don't know what the other option is."

If he just dropped the sweater vest, Louis thinks desperately, staring across the cafeteria where Marcel is cleaning his glasses on his sleeve. Zayn is staring too, like he's seen the apocalypse materialize in front of him in the shape of that particular patterned sweater vest and would like nothing more than to throw a handful of mashed potatoes if only to encourage him to take it off. He could be attractive, or at the very least, passable, if he ditched the clothing stolen from Urkel's closet.

"Then I feel sorry for the lad," Niall pipes up, grabbing Louis' peas without permission. Louis glares, not because he wants them, but because the lunch thievery really does have to stop. "If my mum was dressing me I'd be wearing onesies to school."

"Do you think he's lonely?" Louis asks in spite of himself. The table surrounding Marcel is empty, like he's casting off a beacon of outcast too strong to breach, and there he sits like the one rotten apple in the lunch room that the rest of cafeteria steadfastly avoids. Louis thinks about sitting alone, about how he'd have nobody to laugh at his gummy bear theater and no Niall to pilfer his breadsticks, and wonders if Marcel minds that nobody has the guts or the will to sit down and talk to him.

Zayn shrugs, "He could sit with somebody if he wanted to."

"Maybe he's waiting for somebody to sit with him?" Louis presses.

Zayn gives him a look, like he knows what Louis is trying to discreetly cover up with nonchalant questions, and carefully puts his slice of greasy pizza back down on his tray. He gives Louis another few seconds under his curious gaze as if waiting for him to elaborate, and when Louis refuses to say more, he asks, "Do you want to go sit with him?"

"What," Louis says right away. Niall is snickering at him, so Louis throws a spoonful of apple sauce in his general direction. "No!"

Zayn stares at him for another moment, the type of stare that feels like a doctor's x-ray, so Louis breaks the eye contact that allows Zayn to stare through his eye sockets directly into his brain.

"Christ, Louis," Niall is cursing across the lunch table while dabbing apple sauce from his shirt, effectively distracting them both. "Right on my favorite sweater."

\--

"You love football too much to not be out there destroying everybody else," a cool voice says. "Why aren't you out there playing?"

Louis turns sharply around, half expecting the gym coach to be looming over him with a clipboard where he's scribbling all sorts of comments about Louis' unsatisfactory participation in his grade book, and lets out a low stream of swears when he notices Zayn settling beside him on the grassy hill Louis' squatting on to overlook the football match going on across the schoolyard while the coach repeatedly blows his whistle and critiques everybody's footwork.

"Maybe because coach sucks all the fun out of it."

"True enough," Zayn says, stretching out on the grass and tipping his chest out against the sun. Even in a gym uniform that was probably made out of dead elephant skin, Zayn still looks like all it would take is a few ruffles to his quiff and he'd be ready for an Armani photoshoot. Louis wrinkles his nose, because it's really not fair to look this good without even trying.

He turns away from where Zayn's presumably starting an afternoon nap in the sun, raking his eyes over the football field. Niall's out there, jumping from foot to foot like he's auditioning for a FIFA competition and hollering at his teammates, and Louis watches as the coach releases the ball and a mad scramble for possession begins. A particularly clumsy boy tumbles over his own shoelaces and Niall swoops in to make a goal, and Louis claps from his perch on the hill.

He counts a few more heads. Josh is out there, conspiring with Niall about their next tactic, and Aiden's wiping sweat off his face with his jersey, and standing next to him with adjusting his glasses as the sun bounces off the lenses is Marcel, looking unfazed as always with his socks rolled up to his knees. Without the woolen vests and the thick button downs to mask his body, nothing but a flimsy gray gym tee and matching shorts to hang over his figure, Louis notices that he's actually quite fit, with a slender waist and muscled arms. There's sweat glistening on the nape of his neck right where his primly gelled hair bristles, and god, if only he didn't wear so much hair gel, he might have something going for him.

He can practically hear his mother's voice in his head the moment he thinks it, the way she used to stroke his six-year-old head and read him fairytales and tell him not to judge on appearances, because "beauty comes from within" and all that other bullshit. Of course he has no idea who Marcel really is, what kind of person hides behind those thick glasses and enough hair gel to lubricate thirty car engines, but he supposes it could be somebody as homely and infinitely geeky as on the outside.

Not that that's all that bad. Louis' pretty geeky. His sisters tease him about how he likes to read vintage comic books when the mood strikes and how much he loves _Grease_ , but he doesn't walk around school in argyle socks that come up to his knee and tweed pants. Then again, he walks around in Keds and enough striped shirts to rival a sailor and the occasional suspenders, so he might not be that much better.

It makes him wonder what Marcel thinks when he looks at Louis, if he thinks about what kind of person Louis is and if he's loud or obnoxious or the type of kid who would bake cookies for his grandma. Maybe he never thinks of Louis at all. He has no idea what people think of him even though he cares, he cares a _lot_ , and from the looks of it, Marcel doesn't. Louis wonders what the fuck that feels like, and if it's as freeing as it looks.

He watches Marcel race across the grass, the sweat starting to dapple between his shoulder blades, and then, a soccer ball fly directly at his head. It hits him square on the back of his skull, bouncing off into the grass as Marcel whips around, and that's when the smattering of laughter starts and coach blows his whistle again to put a stop to the horseplay.

"You know, normal people would go up and talk to the people they're obsessed with."

Louis turns around at that, and there's Zayn, propped up on his elbows with a smirk on his face and the sunlight licking up his cheekbones. He looks smug and all-knowing and somehow encouraging, combining into a facial expression that Louis has the strong urge to smack off his face.

"What are you on about?"

Zayn cocks his head to the football field. "Just saying. It might be easier."

He gets up with a lazy sigh before Louis can sputter out a response and assure him that he's not fantasizing about befriending the school geek, because no, just no, moving to ruffle Louis' hair and head down the hill back into the locker room like the next twenty minutes of gym are irrelevant to him. The coach pays no notice, miraculously, and Louis groans and curls into a ball on the grass where he can mingle with the worms.

He watches as a few kids who think they rule the school because they can successfully grow mustaches taunt Marcel and shout homemade slurs after him and nobody makes a move to intervene. He knows what's worse than having absolutely no friends because you're a giant dork. Becoming one by association.

\--

The worst part of starting to notice Marcel, Louis thinks, is most definitely finding out that he's an awesome bloke.

He's passing out papers in physics class, tsking at Niall when he hands back his spectacular C paper, when he notices a tiny doodle on the backside of a wrinkly essay. It's of two scribbled birds, maybe sparrows or swallows, fat around the middle and shaded around the wings, and underneath them are _Script_ lyrics, hasty cursive spelling out _there ain't no help, it's every man for himself_. It's intricate even though it's clearly done in a rush, maybe in a five minute pocket before writing time was up, in shades of bold black and light gray that a pencil deftly marked onto the page.

"Well, this is cool," Louis says to the drawing, flipping it over to find a name, and that's when he sees it— _Marcel_.

"Thanks," a voice says, surprisingly deep, and that's when Louis sees that Marcel is right there, not a foot away in his desk pulling his paper from the stack in Louis' hands and looking silently pleased at himself that somebody's unknowingly complimented his art. Louis doesn't know what to say, even though things like _I love the Script too_ or _do you draw other stuff as well_ are lingering on his tongue. He stares for another second as Marcel tucks his paper away and pushes his glasses up his nose without another comment, and that's when Zayn loudly clears his throat across the room and Louis remembers the stack of papers still waiting to be returned sitting in his hands.

It disturbs Louis greatly, because now he knows that there's more to Marcel than rimmed glasses and patterned vests. He's creative and talented and probably has a whole other list of skills that Louis has yet to notice because he keeps them hidden from the prying eyes of his peers. He's a three dimensional person with an actual life, and it's so depressing to think about the fact that Marcel might be one hundred percent worth the effort of trying to get to know him that Louis groans out loud as he thrusts the rest of the essays out into expectant hands. 

Things would have been lot simpler if Marcel had been dull and boring and completely and utterly unworthy of Louis' obsession.

\--

Louis has ceramics with Marcel sixth period, a class he took solely to fill his credits and get his hands dirty like he did as a six-year-old crafting mud pies for an hour out of his otherwise dreadfully uneventful school day. It wasn't until a few months into the school year that Louis realized that there was another advantage to being in ceramics class aside from the feeling of shoving his hands elbow deep in clay, and that's that he gets the opportunity to stare unabashedly at Marcel out of the corner of his eye without Zayn there to notice and jab his elbow in his ribs and whisper a lesson about discretion in his ears. After all, he's just harmlessly staring.

Marcel works quickly and quietly on his pottery wheel in the dusty corner, completely devoid of all the laughter and rowdy conversation littered throughout the rest of the classroom. He really is a little homely, Louis thinks. The way he slicks his hair back and his face is dotted with tiny marks of angry red acne and his feet pigeon toe toward each other under the table, none of it is particularly attractive. Louis doesn't know if there's hope for him since he's clearly gone through the puberty machine, his limbs lean and his frame tall, the miracle of growth spurts no longer helping him fill out his muscles and grow a mustache over his lip. This might be Marcel for the rest of his life, the kind of boy who walks around in a polished attache case and becomes an accountant and is never late to lunch, no sir. Louis feels bad for him.

Really, though, he should feel bad for himself, because Louis' the one who can't stop watching the guy and cataloging his every move and the things he laughs it. It's like something in his very bones needs to know more, needs to know what bubbles under the surface, and he doesn't have the power to deny his curiosity. Evidence is starting to pile up that Marcel is a legitimately fascinating guy, the kind of person who draws on the back of his homework and has a ticket stub to a _Script_ concert tucked into his locker door. He's good with his hands, Louis can see that much from ceramics class alone, the way his shoes softly press into the foot pedal and he starts molding vases and teacups and miniscule figurines in an hour's time. He has long fingers, slender and precise, and Louis wonders what else they can do.

"What exactly is that supposed to be, Tommo?"

Louis snaps back to reality, wrenching his eyes away from where he's been watching Marcel create a teapot handle with his thumb and forefinger across the classroom—considering that he was supposed to be watching in his peripherals, Zayn's probably right about him needing lessons in discretion—and back to his own masterpiece, which is currently a slumped piece of clay whirling away on his pottery wheel, crooked enough to be a landmark in a Dr. Suess novel. Next to him, Nick Grimshaw is laughing. Louis smears his clay-coated hand off on his apron.

"Your dick," Louis says in return, groaning a second later. He could've thought of a better comeback in his sleep.

"I tilt more to the right than the left. Might want to fix that," he pats him on the shoulder and continues on his merry way, Louis attempting desperately to reform his flower vase into something that mildly resembles an identifiable object, or at the very least, a passing grade.

"You should use all your fingers to widen the opening," a voice says behind him, not nearly as amused as Nick's, and Louis turns around to find Marcel behind him, holding a meticulously sculpted teapot in his hands that he's finished in what has to be no more than five minutes like there's secretly a tiny elf working away under his table producing works of art. Louis feels himself visibly deflating.

"Is that some sort of kama sutra tip?" Louis asks, sending another glance of disappointment at his pathetic lump of clay like it's a deadbeat wingman that failed to deliver.

Marcel smiles, a genuine smile, nothing at all like the one when he's playing along with the kids throwing paper airplanes at his head in physics class, and Louis finds himself amazed at how it's blinding enough to cancel out his horrible hair and even more horrible fashion choices. He gets the sudden, crazy urge to surge up and kiss his mouth and twitches in his seat.

"Could be," Marcel says, then leans forward to gently place his teapot on the edge of Louis' table and slide his fingers around Louis' lump of clay. He's close, close enough that Louis feels scratchy wool on his back and smells the musk of a minty aftershave if he leans back into Marcel's shoulder, and he watches as Marcel bites his lip in his concentration and presses himself flush against Louis' chair to reach the foot pedal and gingerly mold the clay back into the center. His hands work swiftly and fastidiously, creating a clean and smooth hole in the center of his creation within seconds. Louis gapes and wonders how the hell he hasn't flunked out of ceramics yet when he has the veritable Picasso of sculpting working in the same classroom as he is.

"You're really good," Louis says as Marcel pulls back, not sure if he should be pointing to his own salvaged piece or Marcel's teapot. "Your drawings too. You're great at all of it."

Marcel looks at him like he has no idea what to say, a feeling which Louis is extremely familiar with as he feels his ears heat up with the prickling blush of being so bluntly honest for absolutely no reason. His mother was supposed to teach him how to filter his words back when he was still young and impressionable, but no, instead he learned how to blurt out compliments at the most inopportune times and fumble with his words. He reaches up to rub at the back of his neck, realizing a second after his fingers make contact that his hands are covered in sticky clay. Marcel laughs at him—a gentle laugh, the kind that should offend him but instead makes his lips quirk up into a smile—and his face splits open in another grin. Faintly, Louis thinks that his grin would have enough sunshine in it to provide solar power to all of the UK.

"Thank you," Marcel says, and he sounds like he means it. He stands there for another few seconds, wavering on the spot with his tiny teapot cradled in his palms, and then he turns away to move his artwork into storage.

Louis watches his tweed pants sashay into the next room, then turns back to his vase, magically slick and smooth and everything a vase should be, and takes a moment to thank the cosmic deities overhead that Zayn wasn't here to watch any of that.

\--

"God, this thing really is a piece of shit."

"So are you, but I keep you around too."

"Har, har."

Louis bodily throws his backpack into the back of Zayn's car after school, eager to peel out of the parking lot before all the exits are jammed with teenagers itching to go home and smoke weed before their parents get home or play video games before their siblings hog the PS3. He's itching to get into Zayn's kitchen and hoard ninety percent of whatever homemade pastry Zayn's mother spent her day preparing today, and doesn't want to spend any more time than necessary denying himself the sugary bites of heaven waiting for him at the Malik household.

"I have so much fucking homework to do," Zayn groans the second they close their car doors and Zayn starts up the rickety engine. The car really is a piece of shit, and Louis definitely doesn't want be around the day it collapses in the middle of the highway and refuses to be resurrected, but he'll take ten minutes of ignoring the way the entire car grumbles when it climbs hills and the duct tape keeping the radio in place over walking home in sweltering heat or pouring rain or numbing cold.

"Doesn't mean you have to do it," Louis says as he props his knees up against the dashboard.

"The day you don't get to graduate, Lou, will be a funny day indeed."

Louis smacks Zayn's hidden carton of cigarettes out of his hands as retaliation as Zayn pulls them out from underneath his CDs in the glove compartment, watching as cigarettes scatter in the foot room and Zayn whacks Louis around the head. The car jerks to a stop at the back exit as a Jeep tries helplessly to squeeze out in between Zayn's car and the curb, a honking symphony from the back of the parking lot starting to sound. Louis sighs and watches the minutes tick by as they inch away from school property.

"One day," Zayn grumbles as he fishes around in the foot room for a cigarette while trying fruitlessly to keep his head above the steering wheel, "I'll kick you out of this car and you'll have to walk home with all the other losers. How does that sound?"

"I take back everything bad I've ever said about you, Zayn," Louis says promptly, grinning at him over the console.

Ignoring him, Zayn lights up and blows puffs of smoke out the window in satisfied tendrils. If he's being honest, Louis doesn't know what he'd do without the small things like this to keep him sane, even stuff as trivial as car rides with Zayn and putting foam in Niall's locker. It makes him wonder how much high school would suck as a lone wolf, the kind of kid who walks through the hallways alone and doesn't have a partner during science labs. He's so deep in thought about how horrible it would be to suffer through high school without anybody to sync schedules with at the beginning of the year that it's almost symbolic that his eyes choose that moment to travel over to the window where Marcel is walking home in solitude, backpack hiked up his shoulders and button down tucked into his pants. 

He's got earbuds in and is clearly in his own world as he tramples through the weeds growing into the sidewalk, but it makes Louis' entire stomach drop into his toes and ooze out into his socks, and it causes him to grip onto the car door and hope he's at least thinking happy thoughts, because if not, Louis won't be able to fight the urge to jump out of Zayn's car and offer to give him a piggyback all the way back to his house. Maybe he's at least listening to good music, something to distract him from the crisp chill in the air or the weight of three textbooks in his backpack burdening his shoulders. 

They finally speed up as the traffic jam disperses and Zayn zips out of the parking lot like a bat out of hell, leaving Marcel in the rearview mirror, which is probably a good timing, because Louis was seriously considering that piggyback thing.

\--

They finish their freestyle projects in ceramics two days later, with Louis showing off his spectacular vase to nobody but himself and Nick Grimshaw's gnarled mug the center of attention for no reason whatsoever, leaving Marcel in the corner with his museum-worthy teapot forgotten. He doesn't seem to mind too much, though, and Louis gives him a thumbs-up over the crowd that Marcel returns with a tiny upward tug of his lips. It's not at all the type of smile Louis coaxed out of him last time, but it's a start.

\--

"This is really bad," Marcel murmurs over his drawing. Louis peeks over the table to inspect the supposed disaster, and he's promptly met with a spot-on portrait of his own face. Even the curve of his nose is right. Even the tiny crinkles by his eyes.

"You're trying to ruin my self-esteem, aren't you?"

Louis promptly swivels around his own drawing, the type of sketch that could rival a first grader's, and Marcel ducks his head before Louis can see the chuckles threatening to burst from his mouth.

"You made me look like George McFly," Marcel accuses, but Louis hears the smile through his voice. Louis turns his drawing back around, choppy and scribbled and truly horrifying, and draws a giant X through the middle with red marker before grabbing a new sheet of paper and starting over with a dramatic sigh.

They're preparing for masks in ceramics, an assignment that requires a fair amount of understanding of the human face before sculpting, much to Louis' chagrin, and he's about to start on his third attempt of a portrait of Marcel's face before he starts considering resorting to hissy fits and balling up the failures to use as ammunition to pitch at his teacher's nose.  
Marcel, as it turns out, is really good at pretty much anything. He doesn't just draw birds and sculpt teapots, but he sketches Louis' face with startling accuracy that Louis is continuously failing to get his own pencil to imitate. There's something about his expression that's so utterly focused that it encourages Louis to try just as hard, hard in a way that he never would if Zayn or Niall would be sitting across from him, too busy making a caricature out of Niall's nose or Zayn's hair to take the assignment seriously. But with Marcel there instead, eyebrows knitted close and entire face drawn together in intense concentration as he tries to get the line of Louis' eyebrows as precisely correct as possible, Louis starts to soak up his determined desire to do this right.

He tries doing hair first this time, drawing smooth lines with his pencil that all slide back into the paper. There's a single strand loose from Marcel's heavily oiled head, a slight wave to it as it curls up his forehead, and it makes his entire face take on new dimensions. It's actually a little sexy, that one rebellious strand. Louis puts down his pencil and watches him for a moment.

"Why don't you ever let your hair down? Just keep it natural?"

Marcel visibly snaps out of the trance of concentration he was wrapped up in, and Louis almost feels bad for interrupting his train of focus until he looks up, something sheepish and sweet in his smile, and tucks back the almost curl hanging in his face. Louis doesn't know why he's never found him attractive before, especially when he's in the middle of something he's passionate about, everything in his face lit up with a deep devotion that runs past the skin.

"I dunno," Marcel says slowly, like nobody's ever asked him before. "I guess I like to keep it out of my face. Cleaner, y'know."

Louis' fingers twitch on the table, clearly unable to control themselves, and he reaches across the table to pull the tiny wayward strand back in front of his forehead. Louis blushes, and Marcel blushes, and they share three seconds of scary, intense eye contact before Louis looks back down to his drawing and promptly remembers exactly how much skill he's lacking to be a proper art student.

"Now you look Woody Allen."

Marcel laughs again, louder this time like he can't keep it at bay, and Louis looks up and feels the laughter hit him like a contagion, until both of them are giggling over their drawings like two-year-olds watching Barney and eating crayons, and it makes him wonder why the fuck Marcel doesn't laugh more, because it makes him look stunning in a way that tickles Louis' nerves and prods at his cheeks.

\--

Louis is skipping logarithms and exponential equations to have a snack from the vending machine in the second floor bathroom the next time he sees Marcel, in the middle of picking the raisins out of the granola bar he very foolishly chose with his limited snack budget as an impulse decision. He knew he should have gone with the mini doughnuts, and now here he is with a handful of wrinkled raisins that he's piling on top of a sheet of toilet paper while he eats veritable horse chow.

"Oh," a voice says as the door swings open, and Louis almost ducks into a stall in case it's a teacher here to bust his absence from class. He's pretty sure he'll never need logarithms in his life ten years from now, but he's also pretty certain that argument won't get him very far with the professors. "Hello?"

It's Marcel, cautiously peering inside where Louis is sitting cross-legged on the floor. Louis waves him in, noticing that he has a hand holding his glasses in place and a knot of gnarled tape wrapped around his fingers that he had attempted to keep separate in vain.

"I take it you're not skipping for kicks," Louis says, watching as Marcel struggles to straighten the tape surrounding his fist out. He realizes a second later when he takes his hand away from his glasses that the tape is reinforcement for a poor fix where the bridge of his glasses are snapped cleanly in two. Marcel takes them off and starts wrapping tape around the middle, and Louis would be concerned with how infinitely nerdier a pair of taped glasses are going to seem when he steps back into class if he wasn't distracted with how much nicer his face looks without the obstruction of grandfather lenses.

"Had to fix these," Marcel says, satisfied with his work after eight layers of bulky tape succeed in holding together the two halves of his glasses. It looks terrible, lacking all the craftsmanship that his art has, but Louis isn't going to mention it.

"You didn't get punched in the face, did you?" He didn't want to mention that either, but Louis' mouth speaks without permission. Marcel looks at him after carefully balancing his glasses back on his nose and shakes his head.

"I'm just clumsy," Marcel says slowly, facing him. He's doing the thing where his toes point together again that Louis finds simultaneously adorable and depressing. He read once about feet pointing toward desired things and sources of happiness, and here's Marcel, finding comfort only by pointing his feet towards themselves. Louis sighs and pats the spot next to him on the floor.

"You don't have to rush back to class, do you?" Louis asks, looking up at him through his lashes. Marcel looks mildly surprised at the invitation before he slowly shakes his head and settles onto the floor, crooked glasses pushed up his nose and hands fidgeting in his lap.

"What's with the raisin discrimination?"

Marcel's pointing to his neglected pile of raisins with a tiny smile. Louis smirks and says, "I guess I'm a _rais_ -ist."

It's one of his better jokes, and what would have earned him a cuff over the head from Zayn gives him hearty chuckles from Marcel, so Louis laughs along and pushes his toilet paper island of raisins over in his direction. Marcel takes the hint and eats a tiny one off the top of the pile.

"I like raisins," he says quietly as he chews.

"Then I guess you'll have to stick around," Louis says as he finishes off the last of his granola bar and pitches the wrapper in the trash bin. He definitely should've have gone for the doughnuts. "Who else would eat all my raisins?"

Marcel takes another handful and smiles at that, like Louis' made the type of comment that he's never had the pleasure of hearing before, the type of comment that implies friendship. Louis' not sure if he should be retracting his statement or leaning over to give him a hug because honestly, _who_ would eat all his raisins for the rest of his life, but instead he does nothing and hitches his backpack up his shoulder.

"Better get back before I get detention," Louis says, getting to his feet. He looks down at Marcel, taped glasses resting on his nose like a magic-less Harry Potter who turned to accounting to solve his problems, and leaves him sitting on the bathroom floor with nothing but a napkin full of raisins to keep him company.  
He doesn't exactly feel good about it.

\--

Louis has a lot of friends. He knows this because of how many contacts are stuffed into his phone, and how many friends he has on Facebook, and how many people actually asked him if he could make a MySpace so they could follow him. The numbers speak for themselves that he's a riot with a great personality and the boldness to stand up on his desk and sing a musical number in the middle of English class if he wanted to. He has the audacity of a theater kid and the sympathy of an older brother. He is a downright Cool Kid.

What sucks, though, is that even though out of all of his contacts, his Facebook friends, and his potential MySpace buddies, he could hold a meaningful conversation with possibly two of them and yet he still cares about all of their opinions. Even the asshole in physics class who thinks it's funny to post racist comments on his Facebook, or the guy he hasn't spoken to since kindergarten who occasionally drunk texts him believing Louis to be his uptight ex-girlfriend. He cares because that's all he really has, that underneath all of that high school hierarchy and popularity bullshit, he doesn't know what the hell he's even good for.

Marcel doesn't have any friends. None that Louis can see, anyway. He occasionally talks to Liam Payne or stays after class to have a chat with the professor, but he never sneaks out of class to talk on the phone with somebody in the bathroom or has anybody to make an origami football with during lunch. He's alone, a single unit with so much to share and give, and yet nobody takes. Louis bets he has great stories that nobody's ever heard, stories about how he first found out Santa wasn't real or the time he pranked his parents or broke his leg or accidentally set the living room curtains on fire. Nobody will ever know his stories, and yet Louis still aches for a life like his. He's achingly free, free of conformity and social demands in a way that Louis is not, and he's positive he'd rather have that over being liked and appreciated and waved at every other second in the hallway.

So he doesn't go to sit with Marcel during lunch even though he'd like to ask him how his day was and steal his chocolate milk, and he doesn't tell him to join Niall and Zayn and him even though they would love how secretly hilarious he is, and he certainly doesn't stop the flow of traffic in the hallway to skip over to Marcel's locker and kiss him up against it. Because, well. He just can't.

\--

"Do you wanna go to that party at Olly's house this weekend?" Zayn asks from where he's stretched out over Louis' bed in a gargantuan X, messing with the frayed hem of Louis' pillow while Louis bangs on his printer until it finishes printing his English assignment. They have twenty minutes before school starts and they're officially late to first period, and minus a ten minute drive and five minutes aimlessly circling the parking lot looking for a free spot, Louis' printer has exactly five minutes to get its shit together or Louis' going to have to pull out another dead grandmother excuse out of his ass to explain why he doesn't have a paper assigned two weeks ago ready on the due date.

"Not really," Louis says while he shakes his printer ruthlessly and all it does is squeak and moan in response. "Why don't we just go stuff our face with snowcones and go to the cinema?"

"Maybe because I have no desire to watch another remade movie in 3D," Zayn grumbles from the bed, rolling onto his stomach and watching Louis coo to his printer. "I invited Marcel."  
Louis stares fixedly at the printer blinking an error message up at him. "You invited Marcel to the movies with you?"

"No, you dolt. To the party."

Louis looks over his shoulder where Zayn is carefully surveying him while the printer fizzes to a complete stop like a sizzling firecracker dying in the grass. "Since when do you talk to Marcel?"

"I'm not allowed to talk to Marcel?"

"No, I'm just—" Louis frowns. "You invited him?"

"Yeah."

"He said he'd come?"

"Yeah."

Louis takes a moment to pretend to think about it. Zayn's looking at him like he can read him more easily than a comic book laying open on a coffee table, two pages at a time and completely aware of how the story's going to end, but for the sake of his pride Louis pretends to squat by his printer and weigh the pros and cons for approximately two minutes until Zayn starts huffing in impatience.

"Okay, I'll go," Louis agrees as casually as possible. He thinks he sounds nonchalant and effortlessly blase, but Zayn looks less than impressed with his theatrics and throws a pillow at him.  
It hits the printer instead, which dutifully roars to life. It demeans his own technology skills a bit, but it does remind him why he keeps Zayn around.

\--

It's not a bad party, Louis thinks, as Niall attempts to climb the ceiling fan and Olly starts directing at least a dozen guys carrying crates of liquor into the kitchen like he's organizing a wedding party for drunkards. Louis is impressed, especially with how much damage the house is resilient to considering that so far he's watched two boys try to slide down the staircase on a mattress and another do Olympic style back-flips into a bathtub, but he's reached the point where he'd like to find Zayn and a dark bedroom and watch the first passable DVD he finds under the television cabinet while lying on Zayn's stomach. The music is loud enough to pound in his ears like relentless drums and he's already side-stepped two puddles of sick and the people writhing in them still asking for more tequila shots. He's pretty sure there's a truth or dare game occurring in the kitchen that's about to turn into seven minutes in heaven, but Louis has absolutely no desire to partake in a game when he's tipsy enough to end up waking up in a coat closet with the "fit blond" he remembers being paired to kiss with being Niall cuddled into his chest like last time.

Louis ducks out of sight just as the ceiling fan starts loudly groaning with the addition of Niall's weight while several boys try to hoist him up onto the ceiling and nearly runs smack into Zayn, who happens to be carrying an armful of pink drinks. Always the best drinks.

"Thanks, darling," Louis drawls, pulling a glass from Zayn's grip and taking an experimental sip. It tastes like somebody smashed the Caribbean into a single cup and ignited all of his wildest dreams, so Louis drinks more until he's sticking the empty glass in Zayn's face wordlessly requesting more.

"Does this mean I'm designated driver?" Zayn grumbles as he pushes another drink in Louis' hand, this one prickling down his throat like burning petrol. Louis gives him a cheeky grin and starts gyrating up against his hip to occupy his body.

"Seen anybody capable of an interesting conversation yet?" Louis asks him over the thrum of the music as Zayn bops half-heartedly next to him while Louis lets his tipsy limbs shake out whatever dance routine is bubbling in his bones.

"Maybe," Zayn says. "Turn around."

Louis does while he's in the middle of licking the sticky residue of sugar off the edge of his glass, and just as he balances himself and swivels around, his eyes land on Marcel hanging around by the bannister with a red solo cup in his hands that he's holding onto like it's an instrument he's never learned to play that he's expected to perform miracles on. Louis stops his theatrical grinding on Zayn's thigh to watch him survey the party from the corner, the one quiet misfiring cell in a party full of loud, rambunctious teenagers, and suddenly somebody's shoving him in the back in Marcel's direction, that somebody happening to be Zayn.

"Go talk to him," Zayn says before Louis starts complaining that he was in the middle of teaching Zayn disco dance moves. "Just _go_."

So he wanders over there, and it's so incredibly awkward that it makes Louis feel like maybe he's the geek in all of this, uncomfortable in his own skin and trying much too hard to appear as cool as possible. The world is humming in his ear a bit, which is probably just the last drink taking its toll on his brain cells considering that from the taste alone Louis deciphered it was approximately nine parts alcohol and one part sugar, and he takes that one last leap necessary until he's face-to-face with Marcel.

"It's not explosive," Louis says smoothly, leaning against the staircase, and Marcel gives him a tiny smile when he notices him. He's not wearing his usual tie but is still in his trademark vest and polished shoes, but Louis recognizes the tiny effort to be more casual nonetheless.

"What?"

"What's in your cup," Louis says, peering into it. It looks murky, like either beer or rum, and Louis stands by his assessment. "I promise it won't explode."

"Oh," Marcel says. He shakes his drink gently until a tiny whirlpool spins in the depths of his cup. "I don't normally drink a lot."

He has a nice voice, Louis thinks. It's low and soothing just like the way alcohol is down his throat, and Louis would very much like to burrow in his voice in the wintertime to replace his comforter. Marcel's probably waiting for him to say something, but all he has swimming around in his charming brain is the fact that Marcel's shirt isn't buttoned up to his neck, and a sliver of creamy skin by his collarbone is open for viewing. Louis swallows.

"You okay?" Marcel is saying, and Louis nods. He probably looks like he's drunk off his ass, and god, Zayn should have known better than to push him over here after giving him enough liquid courage to sing a naked dance number on the chandelier.

"I like you without the tie," Louis says, and it sounded so good in his head. It apparently encourages Marcel to take a tiny sip of whatever mystery concoction he has swirling around in his cup, so there's that. "Do you wanna dance?"

There's a terrible song on, the kind that puts good music to shame but will still stay stuck in his head for at least three hours when he's trying to fall asleep tonight, but Louis will dance to it if only to see how Marcel moves in that sweater vest. He remembers his body under his gym clothes, shockingly fit and lithe, and maybe he knows exactly how to use it when there's a good rhythm.

"It'll get too hot," Marcel says. "My collar will chafe."

"C'mon, Marcel, don't worry about your collar," Louis says. He puts down his drink and gestures to where half the room is starting a mosh pit to a Pitbull remix. "Is it all the people?"

"Nah," Marcel brushes off, but he's staring at the floor and setting his full to the brim cup aside to be pilfered by some other wandering partygoer in search of more easily accessible alcohol.  
Louis doesn't wait for more of an answer, he just grabs Marcel by the wrist and leads him to where he vaguely remembers there being a door to the backyard. He opens it after a brief struggle with the handle, after which he all but throws himself off the porch onto the grass to breathe in the cool air. He'll be eaten alive by the springtime bugs littered in the ground, but Louis' mind isn't worried about that as he stretches his body into the damp stalks and breathes in the smell of growing greenery. He's starting to feel the liquor in his bone marrow, urging him to do stupid, stupid things, and Marcel taking a seat next to him on the moist grass to stare at the dark night sky isn't helping him filter his bad choices away from the better ones.

"I really like you, Marcel," Louis says into the night, straight to an almost obnoxiously bright star that's glaring into his retina. Marcel makes a soft noise beside him, like he wasn't expecting the honesty or maybe the words themselves, and Louis sits up to sneak a glance at him. He goes from overheated and buzzing inside like a radiator to chilly in the brisk night air, and he thinks about grabbing Marcel's hand where it's resting in the grass. His fingers twitch against the dirt, considering it, but Marcel speaking up breaks his train of thought.

"I like you too, Louis."

It sounds genuine and maybe even a little sad for reasons Louis can't fathom, because here they are at a lovely party listening to the muffled music pound through the walls while Louis digests his liquor and watches Harry's gelled hair shine in the moonlight. Louis smiles at him and reaches over to pet him atop his slick hair. It doesn't feel as oily as Louis imagined.

"I wish I was more like you," Louis sighs dramatically to the backyard at large. There's a swingset behind them rustling in the wind and a rosebush that needs trimming by the door, and something about the atmosphere is making Louis feel like this is the time for something. Something big, like a confession or a quickie in the dirt. He's leaning more to the former at the moment.

He looks over at Marcel, knees tucked to his chest and arms wrapped around his legs, and wonders if Marcel feels the same intensity between them right now as Louis does. Even through the hair gel and the horrendous sweater vest and the geeky glasses, Louis wants to kiss him. Surge up and plant a wet kiss that tastes like tequila and kiwi on his lips and see what happens. It would probably be Marcel's first kiss, and Louis would make it feel good.

Louis feels something in his brain punch him into making a move. A subtle one, even. He feels like he needs to say something now, something about the party or about how Marcel is pretty in the moonlight. Or about how he's a giant douchebag who can only stand being seen hanging out with the dorky kid when he's drunk at a party. Louis feels like apologizing.

"I am a huge jerk," Louis sighs, running his hands through his hair. That isn't what he wanted to say, but it comes out anyway without his mouth's consent because the drinks and the feeling of Zayn pushing him toward Marcel is lowering his inhibitions more than it should. He looks over at Marcel, and something looks imperceptibly sad in his expression, almost apologetic, or maybe even disappointed.

"Yeah, you are," Marcel says with a crooked smile, and that's when the porch door slides open and Nick Grimshaw sticks his head out into the darkness.

"Cops are here! Get the fuck home!" he hollers, and Louis tries to blink the intoxication from his eyes. Can't the cops fucking wait? Just one more moment, one more _second_ —

But the moment's over, and when Louis looks up Marcel is brushing grass off his pants and heading for the fence, done with the conversation even though Louis has more to say, more to ask and more to explain, and that's it.

It's over, and Louis will never get the right moment again.

\--

_six years later_

\--

"And don't you fucking forget the milk, Tomlinson."

"Calm your nuts," Louis hisses into the phone just as he's reaching for the milk and throwing it bodily into his cart. "You and your milk. You'll get your fucking milk."

A five-year-old chooses that opportune moment to waddle by him, eyes wide as tree trunks as he swears loudly into his cell phone. Louis sends over the sweetest smile he can possibly manage when he's in the middle of arguing with Zayn over groceries like an old married couple.

"And the Oreos."

"You know, this isn't exactly what I wanted out of my life back in high school," Louis grumbles as he swerves the cart away from the dairy section and starts searching out the cookies. His cart has a wonky wheel, the kind that repeatedly steers him to the left no matter how hard he pulls right, and this will be the reason he has gray hairs at twenty-five.

"Do you want me to throw you a pity party?" Zayn drones back to him, voice unbelievably bored. Louis can picture him perfectly, sitting on the couch in ratty sweatpants watching documentaries on humpback whales because they don't have enough television channels to watch anything legitimately worthy of all his attention.

"Yes, but only if it's solely people we like and lots of cake," Louis says in return, looking for a box of Oreos throughout the mass of wrapped cookies lining the shelves like sugary soldiers. He finally finds them and goes for three instead of one since that's just how he's feeling these days.

"Get some coffee too," Zayn demands, and that's all he has to say before he unceremoniously hangs up before Louis can ask which kind of coffee his majesty requests, leaving Louis to stuff his phone into his pocket and grumble about his choices in life before he continues his stellar day by ramming his cart directly into somebody's stomach.

"Oh, jesus fuck," Louis groans, watching as his victim doubles over and grabs onto the shelf as he straightens out, at which point Louis promptly feels his luck changing. He may be looking at the most attractive guy he's ever had the pleasure to physically injure in a grocery store, with flyaway curly locks and a loose button down that opens up deep into his chest and lips meant for sucking phallic objects. The words fly away like they and Louis' common sense are choosing now to go on a coffee break.

"Ow," the man groans, his voice deep and rumbling like he's just gargled with whiskey and shards of glass, and Louis has the decency to close his mouth and remember his manners.

"Are you all right?"

"I'm..." he trails off, like his spleen has just split into two mid-sentence, and he's looking at Louis like he's seen him before, a total once-over from head to toe to confirm his suspicions. Louis is pretty sure he would have remembered his face, his eyes, his defined muscles in his forearms—

"Louis?"

Holy _shit_. That face, that voice, those eyes, he _does_ remember them, in flashes of hormones and classrooms that smelled of hot glue and oil pastels.

"Marcel?"

The guy ducks his head, like it's a name he hasn't heard in years, and it only brings more questions to the surface as Louis tries his hardest to memorize everything about him from his long fingers to his sculpted face. What has he been doing? Does he remember Louis well? When did he stop wearing hair gel? How did he get so tall, so handsome, so demanding in his presence that Louis feels himself arching toward him like a flower curves to the sun. It looks like this time it's Marcel who _is_ the work of art instead of making one.

"I had no idea you lived around here," Marcel says, his voice like sex dipped in honey fried in butter. Louis feels himself ogling and is powerless to stop it. His eyes were never that green before, he would've remembered.

"Yeah. I do."

"It's been a long time," Marcel says, clearly not too concerned with the fact that Louis can't string a proper sentence together. His lips are pink and his torso is no longer hiding behind woolen monstrosities, how the hell is Louis expected to focus? "When did you move here?"

"A few years ago, with Zayn. Remember Zayn?"

Marcel points in the direction of his hair, smiling. "Great quiff, right?" he says, and Zayn's going to have a fucking field day when he learns that this is what people remember him by. "You guys live together?"

"Yeah. Separate bedrooms," his brain feels the need to add, and Marcel tilts his head at him like he's not sure if to take that as a homophobic declaration or an attempt to announce exactly how single he is. "You look _great_."

Marcel smiles and ducks his head just like he used to, except now it's infinitely hotter than ever before, and says, "I wish I had more time to chat, but I was only in here to grab something."

"We should—I mean. We should hang out," Louis manages to get out. Marcel looks mildly surprised, like he didn't expect Louis to openly admit that considering Louis spent most of senior year only agreeing to talk to him when they were away from the gossiping eyes of others. God, all the memories of what an asshole he was are rushing back, how popularity was the end all be all, and remembering is not nearly as pleasant as seeing Marcel for the first time in six years.

"Yeah, that's a great idea. Coffee or something," Marcel says, reaching into his pocket to grab a pen. He tears off the bottom of a crinkly receipt buried in his pocket and scribbles what Louis can only hope is a telltale seven digit number that he presses into Louis' palm. "Call me this week, okay?"

And then he's waving and heading the opposite direction, leaving Louis to stare at his skintight jeans and the way they wrap around his bum for two blissful minutes before he runs all the way home without the coffee.

Zayn is going to kill him.

\--

"What the fuck is wrong with you," Zayn says the moment he walks through the door. He spent the entire car ride composing his face, and all it takes is one look from Zayn and he crumbles like a bad poker player. Louis bites on the inside of his cheek and sets down the bags.

"I forgot your coffee."

"And that's why you look like you're about to orgasm in your pants," Zayn says slowly. His eyes are narrow like they're figuring something out, the same look his mother used to have when she was deducing if Louis was responsible for putting cellophane on the toilet. Louis runs a hand through his hair.

"I just ran into somebody."

"Who, Santa?"

Louis bites his cheeks again to keep the smile away. Zayn prods him right where his teeth are chomping down inside his mouth and waits patiently for further explanations.

"Do you remember Marcel?"

Zayn is quiet a moment, and then promptly proceeds to cackle and throw himself on the sofa to roar into the pillow. Louis feels like he's definitely missing something and wastes no time poking Zayn in the ass until he divulges the information he's clearly out of the loop of. Zayn rolls onto his back after another thirty seconds of delighted guffawing before he wipes the tears from his eyes with his sleeve and fixes Louis with a quiet, somber expression.

"You have my blessing," he says, and then pushes Louis out of the way so he can head for the bathroom, shaking his head all the way.

Whatever the fuck that means.

\--

"So I'm thinking it's too soon to call," Louis says the next day over breakfast. He's staring into his cereal bowl like it has all the answers in the world hidden in its milky depths while his drags his bare feet over the floor and waits for Zayn's opinion. Zayn snorts as eloquently as possible and proceeds to pour more Cocoa Puffs into his bowl. Louis takes offense, because being a grown man doesn't mean he has to outgrow immaturity and acting like a headless teenager before prom.

"Too soon to call who?"

"Marcel."

Zayn snorts again, this time stifled into his spoon. Louis glares, but he has bedhead and a few sleepy wrinkles on his face from where the pillow pressed into his cheeks that are diminishing the power of his glowers.

"Why do you still call him that?" Zayn asks.

"...what are you talking about?"

" _Marcel_ ," Zayn says slowly, like nothing else but deliberate emphasis will penetrate Louis' thick skull. "It's a little childish to still call him that."

"That's his _name_ , Zayn."

"Nobody's name is Marcel," Zayn says instantly. "His name's Harry. Just nobody called him that."

"Are you kidding me?"

Zayn looks at him, eyebrows furrowed together, and puts down his spoon. "You really never knew?"

Louis puts down his own spoon and stalks to his bookcase, crooked from where the termites had their way with the bottom right corner, and rifles through at least thirty of Zayn's comic books before he finds his senior yearbook and carries it back into the kitchen. He flips through the pages like a man on a mission, passing the endless photos of cheerleaders and band geeks before he finally finds senior pictures. He remembers Marcel's glasses like it was yesterday that he was staring at him through those thick lenses, and he finds his photo almost instantaneously, his sweater vest demanding the attention of the entire page. And there, written in tiny script on the right, is the name _Harry Styles_. Louis stares.

"Oh, I'm such a terrible person," Louis groans, burying his head in crook of his yearbook and ignoring the papercut he suffers in his chin a moment later. It comes flashing back to him, the night he was sitting on the grass in the cold with Marcel next to him as he went on and on about how much he liked Marcel, how much he wished he could be like Marcel. There was no fucking Marcel. "Why the fuck did people call him that?"

"I dunno," Zayn says, scooping up his cereal bowl and dumping it in the sink. "It was geekier than Harry?"

"I am such a horrible person," Louis mumbles onto the pages, banging his forehead onto three people's senior pictures. Zayn squeezes his shoulder.

"I know. Whatcha gonna do about it?"

Louis looks up from the haven of his arms where Zayn is staring down at him in his pajamas and a creased box of cereal in his hand, and thinks he has a point. He springs up from his chair, pressing his half-finished bowl of soggy cereal in Zayn's hand and fumbling for his cell phone still stuck in last night's pants draped over the side of his bed. There's a crinkly piece of paper stuffed in his pocket next to it, with tiny numbers and a smiley face that might as well be as bright as the sun gleaming in his apartment.

"I'm going to call him."

He punches in the number with the determined aura of a self-realized bully who needs to right his wrongs, feet bouncing back on forth on the floor while Zayn watches him by the sink. The phone rings, and rings, and once more, just long enough for Louis to wonder if Harry gave him a phony number as payback for high school, and then the sound of a deep voice murmuring _hello_ into the phone sounds and his fears disappear again.

"Hello! It's Louis!" Louis says, and promptly starts walking in circles around the coffee table to keep himself occupied. "Did I call too early?"

"Nah, I've been up for a while," Harry says, but his voice sounds sleep-mussed in a way that makes Louis want to nap in his arms. He firmly pushes that thought away. Priorities and all. "I was just going to call you, actually."

"Really? Are you up for that coffee?"

Zayn flashes thumbs-up at Louis from the sink that Louis vigilantly ignores as he continues to pound circles into the carpet waiting for Harry's answer.

"Actually, I wanted to ask if you wanted to come to my family reunion."

Well, not what he was expecting, but he'll take it.

\--

"Thanks for coming!" Harry says jovially as Louis gingerly steps out of his car near a field of hilly grass. Zayn drove him, if only to assure him that a) Harry wasn't luring Louis to the middle of nowhere to tie him up and provide payback and b) Louis wouldn't be backing out. The low whistle Louis hears from the car as Harry bounds up to say hello was definitely not necessary, however.

"No problem," Louis says, staring over Harry's shoulder where the entire Styles clan is laughing over a game of football. It would have been alarming if it hadn't been for Harry suddenly wrapping him up in a deep hug that feels like Christmas and freshly baked pie and birthday presents all pushed into one three second embrace.

"I invited my friend Ed, but he had a last minute gig which left me all alone during the partner potato sack races."

"Which I would have been fine with," a brown-haired woman says sleekly, coming up from behind Harry and throwing an arm over his shoulder. For a second, Louis wonders if he's here as a guest to watch Harry and his girlfriend giggle over family games and barbeque while Louis watches feeling like the fifth wheel—or even better, the _road_ —but then he notices the similarity in their smiles and same noses.

"You must be Harry's sister," Louis says, and she promptly extends her hand in welcome.

"Gemma," she says with a bright smile. "And you must be Louis. I've heard plenty about you."

"That sounds sufficiently horrifying."

Gemma laughs at him, a vibrant laugh that relaxes Louis like a cup of tea, and pats him gently on the shoulder. "All good things, I promise."

She bounces off leaving Harry with a deep blush to rival the shade of a ripe tomato, seesawing back and forth on the balls of his feet while Louis is left desperately wishing she would have stuck around to elaborate exactly what Harry's been saying about him for years.

"So," Harry says, breaking his train of thought. "Are you up for it?"

He points over his shoulder where his family is unpacking bags of balls and sacks like they're about to start a tiny version of their own Olympics, all of them laughing in the same way he remembers Harry laughing at one of his jokes, and smiles.

"Absolutely, I just have to, uh. Take care of my ride here."

Harry nods and heads over to join his family setting up the games while Louis whips around and dashes over to where Zayn is staring after Harry like he'd very much like to take his new look out for a test drive until Louis raps insistently on the driver's window and breaks his stare. Zayn rolls it down and gapes.

"Holy fuck," Zayn says, and Louis grips his chin and turns it back to where it's important, _himself_. "Go hit that."

"You're awful," Louis groans. "Now get the fuck out of here."

"Use a condom," Zayn says as the car purrs to a start and he rumbles out of the grassy path back onto the road, blowing a kiss that Louis makes a point not to catch. "Call me only after you've had sex."

\--

"Okay, rules are, don't fucking cheat."

"Do you have a pen so I can write that down?"

"That's a lot of sass for a champion loser."

Louis stifles his laughter as Harry and Gemma throw dirt at each other like seven-year-olds, but he really isn't in a position to critique anybody's maturity when he has currently has one leg deep in a potato sack pressed up against Harry's behind a starting line made out of spray paint. He's a little glad this exercise didn't involve duct taping their thighs together, because the idea of Harry's leg smack against his while he attempts to coherently run a race is definitely not going to happen while Louis still has a functioning libido.

"What's the plan?" Louis murmurs in Harry's ear after all of them position themselves behind the lopsided crooked line sprayed into the grass. He learned two minutes into introducing himself to Harry's family that everybody from his sister to his grandfather are the most competitive people he's ever met, and he lives with a boy who hides Louis' chocolate as revenge when he beats him at Uno.

"It's all about being one unit," Harry says, leaning over to wrap his arm around Louis' waist and press their hips flush together. "We have to move our combined leg together. We'll start with that one."

"Got it," Louis says, and tries not to ogle the way Harry's mouth moves when he talks. He remembers his voice always being lulling, nice and deep like he's fresh out of dental surgery, but paired with curly hair that takes no orders and legs that go on for miles, Louis is in deeper than a schoolgirl with a crush.

The ornate cowbell sitting on the grill signals the start of the race, and suddenly there's yelling and a frantic dash for the finish line across the end of the field. Harry's hand is warm and guiding on his hip as they move together, starting out in a cohesive army that has them moving as a bionic three-legged being before Louis starts laughing and falling out of step and suddenly, they fall over their legs and Louis is eating a mouthful of grass with Harry roaring with laughter next to him just as Gemma and her boyfriend cross the finish line with triumphant cries, closely followed by Harry's grandparents.

"Awww, Louis!" Harry's moaning, legs tangled up in the potato sack that Louis does not mind in the least.

"It's because you're so much freakishly taller than me!" Louis protests, pointing an accusatory finger at his endless legs. Harry rolls his eyes and struggles with the sack while Louis flops helplessly on the floor and Gemma waltzes over to them to gloat. Ten feet away, Harry's parents finally cross the finish line about sixty seconds too late.

"Losers are last to get their pick of the barbeque," Gemma says sweetly, kissing Harry through the curls, and Harry throws a few weeds after her that fall short.

"My life is over," Harry says. "Nothing is quite like your older sister beating you at sports."

"If it makes you feel any better, all my sisters are younger than me and still beat me at everything," Louis says with a shrug. Harry laughs as he gets to his feet and shucks off the sack, extending a palm to Louis to help him up, and Louis races him to the grill.

"Loser gets last pick of the barbeque!" Louis hollers gleefully over his shoulder, and that's when Harry tackles him to the ground.

\--

"So I wanted to apologize to you," Harry says an hour later through a grilled rib slathered in barbeque sauce that Louis will be tasting in his dreams tonight. Louis has at least three bug bites, has had an accidental encounter with a plant that could have been poison ivy, and has a myriad of grass stains over his favorite pants, and is still having a great time sitting in the sun on a grassy hill with Harry's family. His mother is sweet and reminds him of his own in the way that she ruffles Harry's hair and welcomes Louis with open arms, and his step-dad is hilarious and knows his way around a grill, all the things plus a few bonuses that Louis looks for in friends.

And then came the moment when the pleasantry had to be broken and the past had to be addressed. Louis was ready for it, was working up opening statements and sincere apologies, and then Harry beats him to it.

" _You_ wanted to apologize to _me_?" Louis says the moment he processes Harry's words. There's barbeque sauce smeared all over his cheeks, but it makes Harry smile so he holds back on wiping his face clean just yet.

"Yeah," Harry says, looking at his knees. "Do you remember the last time we hung out?"

"You mean before you blatantly ruined my hiding spot during hide and seek by squeezing beside me with your humongous shoulders half an hour ago?"

Harry bites into his next rib with a grin, a grin which promptly falters as he gets back on track with his conversation. "I meant at the party. Back in high school," he looks at Louis for recognition of the date, and when he sees it in his face, continues. "I said you were a jerk."

"Actually, _I_ said I was a jerk, you just agreed."

Harry shrugs away the technicalities. "Yeah, I agreed. And I was wrong. I'm sorry."

Louis carefully puts his rib back on his plate, staring at Harry incredulously. "I called you Marcel for _months_ and didn't even make eye contact when other people were around because I was afraid you would Scarlet Nerd me and you're apologizing to _me_?"

It sounds even worse when he says it out loud, like exactly how much of a class-A douchebag he was hasn't really drilled home yet until he ties it up in a bow for his ears to hear, but Harry doesn't seem to notice. He shakes his head like Louis' wrong.

"That night when you said you liked me, I thought you were joking. I always thought you called me Marcel to make fun like everybody else, but then..." he trails off with a tiny shrug of his shoulders, and Louis stops himself from urging him to continue. "I realized that you didn't even know what you were doing. You didn't know my name wasn't Marcel, did you?"

Louis buries his nose in his plate, a terrible decision, as he pulls away with warm, sticky barbeque sauce plastered on his face when he pulls back. It shouldn't be funny, because a little bit got in his eye and it burns like a bitch, but Harry's laughing like he's never seen somebody make such a spectacle of themselves eating barbeque, so he turns to face him and tries his best to smile.

"Okay, I didn't," Louis says, carefully wiping the mess from under his eyelids. "Will you forgive me?"

Harry doesn't stop laughing, not for a second to accept Louis' apology, so Louis decides to repay the favor and smear what he's pretty sure is a chicken wing generously bathed in sauce down Harry's face. Harry howls like he's personally offended and Harry's mother tells them they're not doing war paint until after the boat races, so they better keep it together.

They don't.

\--

Louis digs through three boxes of his old high school stuff that his mother salvaged for him but refused to store with her own clutter when he gets home that night, leafing through aced tests and science models until he finds what he's looking for: his portrait of Marcel.

He stares at it for a long time after he finally finds it. Back in senior year, he remembers feeling proud of it when he finally finished it. He remembers feeling like Marcel's nose was the right shape and his glasses weren't too big and his very essence shone through his eyes. Now Louis stares at it like he's looking at a different person, wondering why the hell he ever thought he was good at shading and how on earth he was convinced he mapped out Marcel correctly when he missed out on some of the most important parts, like how his lips tug up in almost smile on the left or the way his eyelashes curl or the way his eyes shine when he laughs like something out of a Nicholas Sparks novel. He had Harry all wrong back then, and not just because he was continuously referring to him as a name coined by the school to increase his nerditude.

"So how was it?" Zayn asks from the door to Louis' room, a suggestive undertone to his voice like he wants all the dirty details he missed out on in high school.

"It was really fun," Louis says. "His family's great. We didn't have sex, though."

Zayn exhales like he's thoroughly disappointed in Louis' flirting skills, stepping into his room and sitting down beside him on the floor to peer over his shoulder and straighten out Louis' portrait, some of the pencil lines faded and some smeared.

"Who is that, Woody Allen?"

Louis smirks, pushing the drawing back into the crammed box of high school knickknacks and leaning against the wall. "It's Marcel. Senior drawing project in ceramics."

"Why were you drawing in ceramics?" Zayn asks, leaning against the other side of the room. It's dark outside by now, a deep gray that's descending through the curtains, but Louis doesn't feel like getting up and finding the light switch yet.

"Wish I remembered."

Zayn chuckles and they're quiet for a moment, leaning against their respective walls while Zayn lets his curiosity roam as he shoves his hand into Louis' box of papers and comes out with a doodle of Batman riding a banana to the moon on the back of a sheet of math homework. Did he really think he was that cool in high school?

"You like him," Zayn says, in a voice that says Louis can share if he wants or stay silent. Louis hates that about Zayn, how understanding he is, and even worse, how long it took Louis to figure that out.

"He's great," Louis says slowly. "He was before, too."

"I know. Niall knew, too. The only one who didn't want to admit it was you."

"What?"

Zayn shrugs, a slight smile twisting his mouth. "We once had a really long chat in the lunch line about how I thought his glasses were cool and what classes he was taking. I didn't view us like we were different species."

Louis knocks his head into the wall behind him a few times until he loses the brain cells that just properly processed that information. "I was a terrible little kid, wasn't I."

"I'll get you coal for Christmas if it makes you feel better," Zayn says, and then pauses. Louis feels a soft hand on his knee a moment later and opens his eyes to see Zayn give his leg a motivational squeeze. "I wouldn't have minded back then, and I don't mind now."

"You couldn't have told me that six years ago?"

"I was trying to be subtle."

Louis smiles at his knees as Zayn pulls his hand away and returns to his corner, running a hand through his hair and staring at the notches in his ceiling. He really ought to wash these pants before the grass stains sets in for good, but he's much too comfortable doing absolutely nothing with Zayn for a few more minutes. It reminds him of the good times of his high school days, like when he and Zayn would lie in the dank dirt under his porch where the air was cool and have thumb wars while playing fuck, marry, kill, a game that would always stop the second anybody's sister got involved in the mix. He flits back to the present, the two of them sharing sentiments in Louis' shadowy bedroom over a box of childhood memories.

"When did we turn into a bunch of old ladies reminiscing over the past?" Louis asks, pushing the box back under his bed. "All we're missing is the cheesecake."

"We could make cheesecake."

"You'd burn the apartment down."

"Let me rephrase that: we could buy cheesecake."

"I'm up for it."

\--

"So I brought you something."

"Better be diamonds, I will accept nothing less," Louis says as he swallows another forkful of ridiculously overpriced pasta. He doesn't mind too much, considering that next time he'll get to pick the place and he's bringing Harry to the nearest fast food joint. If Harry needed to be impressed, he would've already been long gone. The only thing he really minds is the way the wait staff is sending looks of contempt to his sneakers and the music is as thrilling as the same Mozart concerto endlessly put on loop.

Harry rummages through his bag, and puts something on the table that definitely isn't diamonds.

"That isn't diamonds."

"I know," Harry says, and the smile on his face goes from ear to ear. "Are you surprised I kept them?"

"I'm surprised they're still in one piece."

"Do you know why I brought them?" Harry's still smiling, now with a hint of mischief to the edge of it. Louis knows where this is going.

"You're kidding."

"Put them on. All through dinner."

"That's why you brought me to this classy place, you fucking wanker."

" _Put them on_."

Louis stares for another few seconds as if waiting for them to combust. He reaches out between the salt and pepper shakers to gingerly pick up the rimmed glasses he never thought he'd see again, let alone as an accessory for his own wardrobe, but he is nothing if not willing to please. Gently, as if expecting them to snap right in the middle where the tape is still holding them together, he slides them on his face. The lenses have been popped up, which is a relief for Louis' eyes to not have to stare through veritable sheet glass the rest of the evening, and the tape is scratchy on the bridge of his nose. He feels like a proper geek.

Harry is howling with laughter. Louis ignores the looks from the prissy couples surrounding them with their napkins in their shirts and their champagne bottles expensive enough to put down payments on beach houses, because this isn't the fucking library and he's allowed to turn this place into a riot of laughter if he so pleases. He goes with the feeling, dabbing at the buttery sauce that his pasta is sitting in and using it to sleek back his fringe. It's greasy and disgusting and some of it runs down his forehead, but it works wonders as a gel for his hair and even better as a fuel for Harry's chuckles.

"My density has brought me to you," Louis says in the greasiest voice he can muster up in his repertoire. "Oops, I meant my destiny."

"George McFly, huh?"

Louis shrugs, cheeks bright red, and tenderly readjusts the frames of his glasses.

Harry makes Louis wear his glasses throughout all of dinner, and Louis doesn't mind. In fact, he wouldn't mind a sweater vest either.

\--

They head out to Harry's car after dinner, Louis holding the origami swan he fashioned out of his napkin and Harry finishing the dessert he had packed in a to-go box before paying. Louis would love to explain the concept of a to-go box being that one waits to eat it until one has actually finished going, but he keeps his knowledge to himself in favor of watching Harry lick brownie crumbs from his fingers.

"I think I'll keep these, young Harold," Louis says, affectionately petting the glasses resting on the bridge of his nose. The tape is getting annoying, but Louis isn't ready to turn the glasses into monocles just yet. "Seeing as you don't need them anymore."

"Fine by me," Harry says, stuffing his empty box into a nearby trashcan as they head down the street. "Hey, did you know that I still have that portrait of you from high school? It's such an eyesore."

"Careful what you say about my face."

"I meant the drawing," Harry says with a grin. "Your face isn't so bad."

"Oh yeah?" Louis says. If Zayn could see them, he'd be gagging into gutters and complaining about getting cavities watching them flirt, but trying to charm Harry and watching Harry dodge his advances with abashed smiles is too cute to pass up. Harry's hand is in the pocket of his coat, and Louis thinks about reaching for it. "You're only saying that because you have the face of an Adonis. Oh, and because you know perfectly well that your drawings are wonderful."

Harry grabs his forearm and pulls him to a stop by the window of a closed cafe, the only light on inside its depths the tiny bulbs illuminating the pastries. His hair is windswept, pushed to the left and curling into the air, and his right cheek is being licked by the soft yellow light shining out the window. He looks nothing like his high school self, fully grown and individualistic with a bad boy edge to his face that Louis can't pinpoint. He'd look good with tattoos, a small one on his arm or a statement piece on his chest. Louis fiddles with his collar, pulling it aside from his skin as if to imagine it. Harry fits him much better than Marcel, the way it rolls off Louis' tongue and instantly gives him thoughts of brown curls and slender fingers.

"I can't believe you put butter in your hair," Harry finally says, his hand stopping before he rakes his fingers through Louis' fringe, grinning.

"I like to impress my dates."

"Date, huh?"

"Yes. And butter just happened to be the way to do that," Louis flutters his eyelashes at him and sheepishly takes off Harry's glasses, blinking up at him with the most innocent smile he can encourage his face to create. Harry grins, as if he's totally succumbed to Louis' charm, and kisses him.

It's everything Louis forbade himself to seek out in high school, except it's better now because it's not forbidden. Screw forbidden love and all the drama behind it, he wouldn't trade kissing Harry for the world to see on the side of the street without a single ounce of hesitance in the way he presses into Harry's every touch for anything less. Harry kisses with a firm insistence and with a hint of tongue that leaves Louis whining for his touch after he splays out two fingers under Louis' sweater, sliding over the exposed sliver of skin there on his hip, and Louis has to slide onto his tiptoes to properly reciprocate. He tangles his hands in Harry's hair, feeling nothing but soft strands that weave between his knuckles, and he grins when Harry attempts to do the same and promptly pulls his buttery palm away a moment later, laughing into Louis' mouth.

"Well, you definitely don't kiss like a geek," Louis murmurs on his lips, feeling Harry's tongue dart out against his bottom lip a moment later in a way that sends electric shocks through his fingertips that he won't be admitting anytime soon. "But I might need more proof."

"You saw what these fingers did on pottery wheels, didn't you?"

"Are you bragging, Styles?"

Harry takes the bait and kisses him again, right up against the cafe window blanketing Louis' smaller body with his own, and Louis has to try very hard not to crush the glasses resting in his coat pocket in the process.

\--

"Hey, Zayn."

"Mmmmmf," Zayn murmurs back from where he's buried into the coach cushions, one leg slung over the armrest and his nose burrowed in a pillow. Louis flicks on the light and ignores Zayn's answering mumbles of disapproval as he further rejects the lamplight and attempts to become one with the sofa.

"Guess what," Louis says, sounding so nauseatingly gleeful he almost wants to pinch himself. "I kissed him."

Zayn writhes like a homeless snail on the couch, Louis kneeling by him and dancing his fingers up Zayn's shoulder that Zayn promptly swats away. Louis continuously prods him in the ass until Zayn shows his face, a sleepy masterpiece that rises from the pillow like a slumbering dragon.

"Fucking finally," he says, and then, after a closer look, "where the fuck did you get those glasses from?"


End file.
